Dance Parties, Juggling, And Olympic Gold: Inside Gwyneth Phillips' Pre-Game Ritual
When your game gets delayed by 40 minutes, most athletes might spiral, lose focus, or lose their rhythm from warm-up rhythm. Gwyneth Phillips, U.S. 2026 Olympic gold medalist and PWHL goaltender for the Ottawa Charge, threw a dance party in the locker room. Her joyful, team-first response tells you almost everything you need to know about how she approaches the mental game.
Phillips sat down with Amy Wotovich, founder of Back The Team, as part of our Inside the Mental Game of the Games series — a mission to document the mindset behind 100% of the U.S. 2026 Olympic and Paralympic team. Her interview was a masterclass in what it looks like to train mindset at the highest level of sport.
Environment Is Everything
Ask Phillips what has fueled her longevity in the sport — from youth hockey through five years at Northeastern, into the inaugural PWHL season, and now a gold medal — and her answer is immediate: the people.
“I think for me, it’s the people you’re surrounded by. If you have two ingredients…the love of the game and great people…you can find success and longevity, because you never want to leave that behind.”
The science of peak performance consistently shows that psychological safety and team cohesion are prerequisites for sustained high output. Phillips has intuitively built her career around environments that provide exactly that. And when she describes the U.S. national team — veterans like Hilary Knight and Kendall Coyne creating a locker room that is, in her words, “not clicky” and “very fluid”, she’s describing the conditions under which elite performance is most reliably produced.
Superstitious? Absolutely.
Phillips has a pre-game routine she follows without exception. Whether she’s starting, sharing time on the ice, or even not playing at all.
“I do it if I’m playing…and I do it if I’m not playing so that my other goalie has a good game. Because if I don’t do it, something bad’s going to happen to my goalie partner while they’re playing.”
The ritual starts two hours before puck drop with an audio track she first was introduced to in college: layered sound frequencies over a guided meditation, designed to prime the body for performance. She listens lying flat, arms crossed, feet together, rolling on a ball simultaneously. From there, it moves into visualization, then juggling.
“I have to juggle, but I have to do 10 off the wall and then 10 off the wall with one hand, 10 off the wall with both hands, 10 off the wall with one hand... and if I drop it, I have to restart.”
The track is a Northeastern-specific audio from college that’s tailored to the Huskies.
“At one point, it says, ‘Be the Husky. See the ice like a Husky.’ At another point it’s like, think of all the people that have helped you get here. And I really like that part.”
At the Olympics, her good friend and fellow Team USA goalie Aerin Frankel did her own thing. Everyone else had cleared out. Two goalies, two rituals, no explanation needed.
“She’s doing her own weird thing and I’m doing my weird thing and everyone else is gone. They all know, some people know what I’m doing and they just let me be.”
Letting Go While Learning
Her pre-game ritual ensures preparation before taking the ice. The in-game mindset is a different challenge entirely, and Phillips is candid that it’s still a work in progress.
“That’s the place I’m still working on. I get a little too heated when a game gets heated.”
She describes the balance after being scored on: take the lesson, leave the rest.
“You can learn from it, but you can’t learn from it right then and there.”
It’s a mindset that separates good competitors from great ones. The ability to process a mistake without dwelling on it and move forward, trusting the real learning will come later in practice.
On Playing for the National Team
The national team doesn’t have the volume of a PWHL season. They get together for specific events, with a specific mission each time. Phillips finds that clarity energizing.
“For the national team, it’s really fun to just be like, this is the mission. Everyone is so responsible and has to do their own thing on their own time, and then there’s just expectation to come to these big games at 100%.”
Asked to name the highlight of the Olympics, Phillips pauses. The gold medal is part of it, obviously. But it’s not what she reaches for first.
“At the end of the day, it’s obviously awesome to win an Olympic gold medal. That’s so cool. But I think for me, it was just getting to see everyone together. You’ve got some of those girls who’ve been playing together on the national team for like 15 plus years, and then you’ve got some new faces like me. And I think it’s really cool to see some of those vets just, how well everyone accepts everyone. It’s a very fluid team.”
And on the direction of women’s hockey more broadly? Phillips is direct about the moment they’re in.
“It feels like the Olympics did a lot for women’s hockey. A lot of people are watching the Games and seeing just how fast and competitive it is. So it’s really fun to be a part of that growth and push hockey forward to that next level.”
ABOUT THIS SERIES
I'm Amy Wotovich, and I am on a mission to interview 100% of Team USA's 2026 Olympic and Paralympic athletes for Back The Team's series Inside the Mental Game of the Games — the most comprehensive mindset record of a single Games cycle. What do elite competitors actually believe about pressure, identity, failure, and joy? Gwyneth Philips is one of hundreds of athletes sharing their unfiltered answers. Follow the journey!
